Audio and Classical Files

By GINA VIVINETTO, DANIEL PUCKETT, PHILIP BOOTH and JOHN BELL YOUNG
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 24, 2002

CHEMICAL BROTHERS, COME WITH US (ASTRALWERKS) British electronica maestros Chemical Brothers are back with Come With Us, a fourth album as inviting as its title. It will thrill fans blissed out by Dig Your Own Hole, the act's 1997 breakout disc of busy Big Beats and sonic hodgepodge.

Hear opener Star Guitar and just try to deny its seduction. The song grooves along hypnotically, with a nearly erotic vibe that could lure even your most awkward pals to the dance floor. Thumpa thumpa thumpa. It's all delicious bass blasts, nervous dashes of strings and a robotic stutter voiceover pointing its finger at you, curling it, and commanding: "Come with us."

Like the best electronica and dance music, Come With Us nabs you with its bristling energy and innovation. But what's nice -- and what you often get from the Brothers, aka Tom Rolands and Ed Simons -- are real songs. Yes, these guys know a thing or two about melodies, about the nuance of words and lyrics -- though many cuts are instrumental.

The Brothers also celebrate diversity, making certain each song runs in a different direction from the one before.

Don't miss the jittery It Began In Afrika, certainly inspired by hip-hop/electronica pioneer Afrika Baambaata. Hoops is another danceable tune, a sonic amoeba of musical twists and turns that features lovely acoustic guitar strummed over trippy 1960s music.

Guest Beth Orton, the far-too-little known British "folk" singer, adds angelic vocals on The State We're In, her third Chemical Brothers collaboration. Former Verve singer Richard Ashcroft sings on the The Test. B+.

-- GINA VIVINETTO, Times pop music critic

NINE INCH NAILS, AND ALL THAT COULD HAVE BEEN (NOTHING/INTERSCOPE) Yeah, what could have been if Trent Reznor had made a new album in the past three years? We'll never know, but as a result of his rehashing music he made when he was actually making music, we do have this live disc, which is a greatest hits compilation performed live. Performed competently. Performed energetically. But, if you have the originals, performed not very interestingly.

Unless you just want an audio souvenir of a show, live sets work best if they include some reinterpretations of the original material; otherwise, the new versions of the songs are just the old versions plus crowd noise. Aside from some new squawks and bleeps, and Trent calling the audience "pigs" a few times -- hey, March of the Pigs! Piggy! Get it? -- you won't find much new here.

However, it does capture the energy and aggression of the tour for The Fragile, and that's something.

It just could have been a heck of a lot more. B.

-- DANIEL PUCKETT, Times staff writer

FU MANCHU, CALIFORNIA CROSSING (MAMMOTH) If you hope this summer will put the past several months behind us; if you hope for one of those golden sun, surf and sand summers; if you hope for a summer like a '60s vision of California -- then you hope the radio hit of summer 2002 is Thinkin' Out Loud or pretty much any other track from California Crossing.

The music is Fu Manchu crunchy -- the guitars growl and the drums pound -- but it's brighter, more open and airy, with an occasional piano, and more important, the thing just swings.

From Separate Kingdom, an afternoon cruise down the Pacific Coast Highway, to the title track, desert sun glinting on chrome flashing past at 140, this album zooms and weaves and flat-out rides. And if there's any justice out there, if we're really okay now, we just have to hear this muscle car music coming out of the mobile boombox next to us at a July stoplight.

That's when we'll know summer 2002 is all right. A

-- D.P.

REUBEN WILSON, ORGAN BLUES (JAZZATERIA) Reuben Wilson, who notched a string of Blue Note albums in the late 1960s and early 1970s, retired from music for 15 years before being rediscovered by the hip-hop generation in the late 1980s through samples on recordings by A Tribe Called Quest, Nas and Brand New Heavies.

Wilson, raised in California, wastes little time saluting the late Brother Jack McDuff, opening with Blues for McDuff, a medium-tempo groove thang with a catchy B-3 melody rapidly segueing into Melvin Butler's rich-toned turn on tenor saxophone, a similarly tasty outing by guitarist Grant Green Jr. (son of the legendary six-stringer) and, later, a hyped-up solo by the leader.

The group pays tribute to another legendary jazz organist, Jimmy Smith, with the simmering Back at the Chicken Shack, and dips into their repertoire of standards for a sultry take on Willow Weep For Me. Wilson and his partners give good groove, in no small measure due to the righteous comping of Green and the chitlin-circuit R&B propulsion of drummer Bernard "Pretty" Purdie. It just feels good. B.

-- PHILIP BOOTH, Times staff writer

TONY MONACO TRIO, MASTER CHOPS "T" (SUMMIT RECORDS) Tony Monaco, based in Columbus, Ohio, goes for a slicker approach that offers more energy and, frankly, more musical contrast than the otherwise unreproachable Wilson. Ode to Brother Jack, as might be expected, is good and greasy, with a fat backbeat provided by drummer Louis Tsamous and a virtuosic improvisation by the organ man.

There's seldom a dull moment here, from Acid Wash, which wouldn't be out of place on a Medeski Martin and Wood disc, to the gospel-blues feel of the Horace Silver-influenced Ya Bay BEE, to inventive readings of several familiarities, including sensitive Pat Metheny ballad So May It Secretly Begin, bouncy Sonny Rollins calypso St. Thomas and Average White Band funk hit Pick Up the Pieces. Not too keen on the loungey vocal numbers, though. B.

-- P.B.

CLASSICAL FILE

THE SONGS OF FRANCIS POULENC; PAUL SPERRY, TENORIAN HOBSON, PIANO (ZEPHYR) Few musical genres sport the elegance of the French chanson. Poulenc (1899-1963) wrote more than 120 songs, fashioning many of them into idiosyncratic cycles dealing with particular subjects, and set to sumptuous poetry by numerous masters.

So impressive is Paul Sperry's interpretive savvy and letter-perfect French diction that, in the famous C, a song inspired by the horrors of World War I, he carries us directly into that perhaps not-so-remote world. When he imposes a slight hesitation or a delicate pianissimo on a particular word, the effect is nearly cinematic.

Sperry moves beyond the text and into the realm of the senses. His reading also is informed by a sense of time and place, as if it were being sung in that very field some 87 years ago. How poignant and refined, too, are his readings of Young Soldier, another of the War Songs, and the painfully nostalgic La grenouilliere.

But he is just as much at home in the gossamer, lighthearted songs such as Voyage a Paris and the mercurial Paganini. In the wistful, indescribably elegant Hotel, where Poulenc evokes a daydream inspired by a puff of cigarette smoke, Sperry is perfection. In the minute and a half it takes to sing, he ushers us into a world of tender perspectives and isolated regrets.

Now in his 60s, Sperry's voice has lost something of its once youthful sheen, but what he has gained in its place is so sophisticated, ardent and artistic that any vocal compromises are insignificant. Ian Hobson proves an ideal collaborator, his playing at once thoughtful, deftly characterized and wholly idiomatic. A+.

-- JOHN BELL YOUNG, Times correspondent

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.